TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Wednesday, June 25, 2014

New Orleans Nearly Finished Killing Off Its Public Schools

I am hesitant to say much about all this but the discharging of
teachers and cherry picking students is hardly promising particularly
when we are dealing with a Southern Culture that has continuously
worked to betray Federal intentions regarding racial equality
forever. It may not be as awful as it was merely fifty years ago but
there is still plenty of traces out there.

It ultimately has to be solved from the ground up through a communion
of intention. We are at least trending there and of course, for the
best and brightest, escape is now easy. That is also essentially
true for the top two thirds who settle down and make it all work for
themselves. It is the bottom third that is been short changed
everywhere. They need to be grabbed and sharply channeled in order
to ensure productive citizens.

Let us hope that this scheme turns out wonderfully and human nature
is nicely suppressed.

New
Orleans is now home to the first and only school district in the
United States that is all-charter.

The
Recovery School District on Wednesday shuttered its last remaining
traditional public school, meaning that almost all New Orleans
schools are now privatized. The shutdowns moved forward despite
opposition from local communities.

"The
right to public education is fundamental human right," said
Monique Harden of the New Orleans-basedAdvocates for Environmental
Human Rights in an interview with Common Dreams. "Profit motive
drives insane, reckless, unsafe decisions that are not in the best
interests of children."

Benjamin
Banneker Elementary, which closed Wednesday, is one of the five
remaining traditional public schools in the Recovery School District
that will not re-open this fall, according to the Washington Post.
This leaves only five remaining public schools in New Orleans, all of
them under the control of the Orleans Parish School Board, The TImes
Picayune reports.

The
state-run RSD was created in 2003 with the expressed purpose of
improving school performance. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, the agency embarked on an aggressive campaign to
prevent public schools from re-opening and divert public funds to
charter schools, rapidly privatizing the education system.

"The
Recovery School District took over four fifths of the city's schools
after the storm, and now it has closed or chartered every school it
reopened," according to The TImes Picayune. The RSD also
controls schools in other areas of Louisiana.

Author
Naomi Klein has cited mass privatization of New Orleans public
schools in the aftermath of Katrina as an examples of what she calls
the "shock doctrine," in which crises are
exploited to push otherwise unpopular and neoliberal policies on
communities.

The
sabotage of New Orleans public schools included the
mass-firing of 7,000 teachers, most of them African-American, and
subsequent hiring of disproportionately white and young teachers,
some of them hailing from Teach for America, the Post reports. While
the teachers have since won a $1 billion lawsuit for wrongful
termination, the privatization drive continues.

Critics
charge that the rapid privatization further segregated New
Orleans schools by shepherding white students into the best charter
schools while sending African American students into poorly resourced
ones. The RSD has been hit by at least one civil
rights complaint alleging discrimination.

“Under
the guise of education reform, corporate profiteers and politicians
have zeroed in on black communities, leaving behind devastation and
destabilization,” said Debra Jones of the New Orleans organization
Conscious Concerned Citizens Controlling Community Changes in a
statement released earlier this month.

A
report by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of
Minnesota Law School, published in 2010, found that, "The
increasingly charterized public school system has seriously
undermined equality of opportunity among public school students,
sorting white students and a small minority of students of color into
better performing OPSB and BESE schools, while confining
the majority of low-income students of color to the lower-performing
RSN sector."

Despite
evidence of climbing segregation and inequality, the New Orleans
model of privatization is taking root in cities across the United
States, including Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington,
DC.

Tracie
Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute told Common Dreams that
the "draconian" spread of charter schools leaves
communities with "no fallback plan." She asked, "What
happens when one of your charters, two, three, or all of them fail?
What does a community do then?"

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About Me

Jan 2015 - 3 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled 'Paradigms Shift'. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.